Inspiration behind Rio 2016 Summer Olympics logo

Being local the designers have the remarkable idea of their surroundings. And they just did an immense job by implementing all the natural elements into the logo. Let’s find out the inspiration behind the scene, font, color and challenges that the designers had to suffer for designing the Rio 2016 summer Olympics logo. Here we go…

The inspiration

Every inspiration has a story. The great idea of Olympics logo sparkled in the creative brain of the CEO of Tatil Design. While taking a deep dive in the Pacific Ocean, Gelli had observed the semantic beauty of Sugarloaf Mountain. Gelli wants to design a sculpture logo that is dedicated to a sculpture city. And nothing can be as figurative as the Sugarloaf Mountain sculpted by nature. You can see a clear and positive glimpse of nature’s Sugarloaf Mountain in the logo itself.

The font

It took about 18 months to develop Rio 2016 by the Tatil Design. But the Olympic association wants the font that will completely blend with the natural curves of the Sugarloaf Mountain. That takes the designers a new turn for building up the font that completely represents the natural curves of the holy mountain. Tatil design hired a font designing company Dalton Maag. The creative designer of Fabio Haag was expecting to design a corporate project, but to their surprise they have to design font for Olympics logo. Roughly 360 fonts have been produced to get the perfect and suitable match for the dedicated logo. Finally, they handmade the letters that work nicely to match the letter ‘R’ and numbers ‘2’ and ‘1’.

The color

Rio is a very colorful city with great culture. The colors are connected with nature. Green is connected to the nearby forest, Tijuca Forest, one of the biggest in the world. Blue represents ocean that inspires their creativity. The yellow and orange come from their warm temperature. The three colors have meanings, too, one meaning from nature and one from the people. Yellow represents the sun and the people’s warm nature. The blue color symbolizes the sea and Carioca’s easygoing ways. Green is for the forests and the hope these Brazilians have. This describes the extra ordinary feeling that the designers possess about their home country.

The Challenges

The foremost challenge that the designers had to face is to maintain the secrecy of the project. The CEO of Tatil Design, Gelli said “The hardest part of the entire process was keeping their winning idea under wraps during the four months between when it was chosen and when the Olympic design committee made the official announcement. Only 10 members of our firm knew, so I and my nine colleagues created a fake project that we were all supposedly working on. Secrecy was at such a premium that we cordoned off space in the studio that was only accessible via a fingerprint entry scan lock”.

Another big challenge they had to face is to transform their imagination of Sugarloaf Mountain into the circular form of a logo that represents Olympics’ symbolic 5 rings. With the final result, you can say that they have executed it very well. Besides, blending the font with nature and providing them alive natural character is also contributed as the tough challenge they had to go through.

Key takeaways

The resulting logo is among the prettiest of this century. The logo was unveiled on New Year’s Eve 2010 in front of some two million people gathered at the Rio’s Copacabana Beach for the traditional fireworks display. After the logo was projected onto giant screens to rousing applause from the crowd, the designers knew they had a success on their hands.